© Mary T. Sarnecky

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Julia Catherine Stimson was born on 26 May 1881 in Worcester, Massachusetts, to Henry Albert Stimson and Alice Wheaton Bartlett Stimson. The Stimson/Bartlett families were illustrious and service-oriented. Their public traditions and civic contributions could be traced to Seventeenth Century America. Stimson's father was a prominent Congregational clergyman and her maternal grandfather was president of Dartmouth College.¹ She received her primary and secondary education in the St. Louis, Missouri, public schools and in the Brearley School in New York City.² Stimson matriculated at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York and graduated from that institution in 1901 with an A.B. degree.³ In 1904, she entered nurses' training at New York Hospital where Annie Goodrich was superintendent of nurses.⁴ Her first position as a trained nurse was as superintendent of nurses at Harlem Hospital in New York City from 1908 until 1911.⁵ Then she accepted the first of several roles at Barnes Hospital and the Children's Hospital, the Washington University Hospitals in St. Louis, Missouri. There she initially led the Social Service Department, later adding the supervision of the Department of Nursing to her duties and lastly assuming the additional responsibilities of overseeing the Training School. While handling all of these positions, she simultaneously earned an A.M. degree in sociology.⁶ In May 1917, Stimson led the nurses of Base Hospital #21, the Washington University unit, to their wartime service in Rouen, France.⁷ Her subsequent assignments as chief nurse of American Red Cross Nursing in Paris and as director of nursing for the American Expeditionary Forces in Tours, France, prepared her for the challenges that lay ahead. For her service in France during the war, the United States government awarded Stimson the Distinguished Service Medal. Other nations bestowed the British Royal Red Cross, 1st Class; the French Medaille de la Reconnaissance Francaise; the Medaille d'Honneur de l'Hygiene Publique; and the International Red Cross Florence Nightingale Medal on Stimson.⁸

After Stimson's arrival in Washington in July 1919, she became dean of the Army School of Nursing and acting superintendent of the corps.⁹ She accepted the responsibilities of the superintendent of the Army Nurse Corps on 30 December 1919.

Marlette Condé, an early alumna of the Army School of Nursing described Stimson as:

. . . While not stout, Miss Stimson was a large woman, tall and well-proportioned. She was direct in manner, forceful in speech. In uniform, appropriately enough, hers was a "commanding" presence. But she was an approachable person.¹⁰

When Stimson completed twenty years of service on 31 May 1937, she decided to retire. In the preceding years, several of her close friends, a dear sister, and her father passed away.¹¹ Stimson planned to return to New York and care for her widowed mother. A sense of her own mortality, the need to completely relax and have some leisure, and a wish to escape the demands of a complex, often frustrating bureaucracy led to her retirement. But Stimson's retirement from the Army did not signal a retirement from a life of public service. She subsequently served American nursing in a number of ways. The American Nurses' Association elected her president in 1938,¹² a position she held until 1944.¹³ She later became reinvolved in defense issues during World War II. Stimson died in September 1948 at St. Francis Hospital in Poughkeepsie, New York, of circulatory failure following abdominal surgery.¹⁴ Her death came at age 67. Following her death, the Stimson family spread her ashes by a stream on her property in Briarcliff Manor, New York.¹⁵